Deeplinks Blog posts about NSA Spying

Oversight boards and congressional subcommittees can occasionally be effective, but nothing keeps the government in check like investigative reporting. Here are eight stories about surveillance that made our jaws drop this year:

The fight to end overbroad surveillance took place in a variety of battlefields in 2014, including Congress. Some of the legislation Congress considered represented real steps towards curtailing the NSA’s overbroad authority, while some bills were fake fixes. And the NSA’s defenders fought real change at every step of the way.

At the start of 2014, the fear among privacy activists around the world was not that surveillance would be ignored as an issue. After six months of relentless revelations from the Snowden cache, how could it? Instead, they were concerned that mass surveillance would be normalized. Numbed by the relentless list of privacy violations conducted by the NSA, GCHQ and other intelligence services, would Internet users eventually just throw up their hands, and accept that the price of a global communications system was the end of privacy?

For the lastthreeyears, EFF has greeted the holiday season by publishing a list of things we'd like to see happen in the coming year. Sometimes these are actions we'd like to see taken by companies, and sometimes our wishes are aimed at governments, but we also include actions everyday people can take to advance our digital civil liberties. This year has seen great progress in areas such as transparency reports and encrypting digital communications. We want to build on that progress in 2015.

On Wednesday of last week, the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2015 passed in the US House of Representatives. The bill, H.R. 4681, contains Section 309, which imposes guidelines for when the intelligence community can keep some communications collected under Executive Order 12333 (EO 12333). President Reagan wrote the policy document in the 1980s to provide the framework for intelligence agency conduct. Today, it is used to justify mass surveillance of communications.